Forgottenpollinators

CHAPTER

5

Bees in the Bestiary,

Bats in the Belfry A Menagerie of Pollinators

sTEVE REMEMBERS:

I worked my way along the small desert wash set against Horned Lizard Hill, my eyes intent on bees darting into the canopies of flowering trees for nectar. The trees were ablaze with golden blooms here on the edge of Tucson, where Sonoran desertscrub vegetation furnishes food and shelter to a remarkable variety of native bees. I found them by the thousands-greedily drinking from all the brilliant yellow blossoms that had simultaneously exploded into flower. The woody legumes most attractive to the bees during mid-spring are formally named Cercidium microphyllum, but local folks know them as the little-leaf palo verde. Over a period seldom lasting longer than three weeks, each palo verde produces enormous masses of nectar and pollen attracting countless native bees per acre. A smattering of wasps, flies, true bugs, and beetles also find the lure of palo verde blossoms irresistible.

Within one palo verde canopy, I came across a 6-foot-tall saguaro cactus, putting forth an enormous white blossom for the first time in its 30 years of growth. A milkweed vine twined the two together-nurse

ss

tree and recently matured cactus-for a brief moment in time. Below the tree and the cactus were a dozen or so bellyflowers. Some had begun to bloom when they were no more than 4 inches tall and six weeks old.

Most of them had recently passed their prime; their ephemeral flowers had withered and their seedpods were soon to pop open.

I took a swing at an extremely fast-flying gray blur of a bee, but missed. It was a male digger bee. It was an old friend to me: a big gray Centris pal/ida female, a harbinger of spring. In fact, I began studying the mating habits of this species with another friend, entomologist John Alcock, nearly 20 years ago.

In my head I began to refine the search image I needed to distinguish native solitary bees from the omnipresent honeybees on this and neighboring trees. I began to sort out the others by their flight patterns, their sizes, their colors. There were many digger bees, quite a few belonging to the leafcutter family, and even a few membrane or plasterer bees.

Carpenter bees and bumblebees were active too. I then swept up as many kinds as I could capture that day, recording their nectar sources and periods of activity.

Back at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum at day's end, I dumped my catch onto a piece of notebook paper and sorted the pile of now quiescent bees into groups to show Gary. Each pile had bees that looked similar enough to one another to belong to the same genus or species. In all, during just a few morning hours, I had collected solitary and primitively social native bees belonging to 6 families, 20 genera, and perhaps as many as 50 different species. We identified representatives of Anthophora, Ashmeadiella, Centris, Chalicodoma, Coelioxys, Diadasia, Ericrocis, Gaesischia, Megachile, Triepeolus, and Xylocopa-just to rattle off some of the tongue-twisters. The number of species was more difficult to determine because a few of the harder-to-key variants may in fact be new spectes.

One thing was clear: Gary and I were living in the midst of a rich but imperfectly known Sonoran Desert pollinator fauna, including the bees. The possibility of nabbing something new to science-by intensively sweeping our nets through the canopies of even the most common trees-was not an unrealistic expectation for the days' bee hunt. Few bee biologists stay in one spot long enough to collect its full complement of pollinating animals. Even if they focus on just one

86

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

On a southern Arizona hillside, a female carpenter bee (Xylocopa californica arizonensis) is shown in flight returning to her nest gallery inside the dried stem ofa sotol (Dasylirion wheeleri). She has fashioned pollen and nectarfrom nearby mesquite and ocotillo flowers into large provision masses for her voracious grublike brood.

locality, few desert entomologists take the time to sample the entire blooming duration for even a few of the most dominant Sonoran Desert plants. What I could find might astonish my colleagues, for this desert is no barren wasteland as far as flowering plant and pollinator life are concerned.

Compared to other deserts around the world, the Sonoran Desert surrounding Tucson and extending into Mexico is exceedingly rich in native plants. On the 8oo acres surrounding Horned Lizard Hill, our colleagues Jan Bowers and Ray Turner have identified nearly 350 kinds of plants. Gary and his students have collected another 366 species in two adjacent canyons 30 miles south, on the desert's edge near Tumacacori, Arizona. The Desert Museum's flora, including the adjacent Tucson Mountains, comprises more than s8o species of plants-and these plants may harbor almost r,ooo species of native bees in the same mountain range. That would make it the richest known parcel of bee real estate anywhere in the world.

Bees ignore several ecological axioms that are key determinants of diversity in other lifeforms. One such mandate is that as you advance north or south away from the tropical zones edging the equator, you will encounter fewer and fewer species of animals and plants. In other words: local species diversity for many kinds of organisms reaches a maximum in the lowland tropical regions, the zones lying within 30 degrees north and south of the equator. But with bees, this just isn't the case. With few exceptions, their species diversity and abundance decline as you move from the dry temperate to subtropical regions in both hemispheres. Thus bees achieve their greatest abundance and diversity in the deserts and savannas of the world. It is estimated that some r ,soo bee species occur within the arid subtropical deserts and semi-arid uplands within an hour's drive from Tucson. In the wet tropical rainforests of the New World and Old World, however, bees are a distinctly underrepresented pollinator group. Tropical IllG-Iffitaintops seem to be peculiarly lacking in bee diversity. Such habitats nurture an astounding array of pollinatorsflies, beetles, butterflies, moths, birds, bats, and other mammals that simply outnumber bees.

What they lack in number of species, however, the bees--especially the social bees living in populous colonies-make up for in overall 88

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

biomass. There is one group of bees that is relatively abundant in the New World tropics: the fully social meliponines. Within that group, the stingless bee genera, Melipona and Trigona, are relatively abundant in wet tropical forests, especially in terms of the number of colonies per acre and their contribution to the overall pollinator biomass. These social insects are also exceedingly important as keystone members of such communities due to their activities: the "by-products" of pollination result in their cycling large amounts of nitrogen through these forests.

Dave Roubik has estimated that 26 percent of all bees in the rainforests of French Guyana are stingless bees. Thus, while the overall species richness of bees seems to be reduced in the tropics, some groups of bees are disproportionately important.

Outside the tropics, bees are often more numerically abundant than most other taxonomic groups of pollinators, such as hummingbirds, bats, butterflies, or beetles. Within the continental United States, several entomologists have estimated that there are as few as 4,ooo or as many as s,ooo species of native ground-nesting and twig-nesting bees.

Other bee-rich continents or regions are those that have large expanses of deserts or savannas-such as Australia, where about 3,ooo different kinds of bees occur, Africa, with over 3,ooo species, and the Mediterranean countries, with about 3,ooo species in their bee faunas.

Globally, taxonomists have named and cataloged about 25,000 bees and at least 4,ooo wasp species active in pollination among the 103,ooo known Hymenoptera species. This latter taxonomic group of bees and wasps contributes one out of every ten animal species now inhabiting the earth. Judging from the growth curve in newly discovered and named bees during recent decades, there are perhaps as many as 4o,ooo bee species alive today.

We cannot yet say why bees are distributed as they are today. Nor do we know which historical consequences of past plant distributions or competitive interactions between pollinators or nest site availability may have influenced where bees are found today. Even so, we can see a few general patterns from our viewpoint atop the desert mountain. For one thing, there are more bee species in regions with Mediterranean climates and vegetation: areas with warm, seasonally dry habitats that are often near the limits of subtropical regions. Bees are extremely abundant and diverse in the deserts oflsrael, the southwestern United States, and northern Mexico, in Sonora.

BEES IN THE BESTIARY, BATS IN THE BELFRY

89

The patchiness of floral resources-in space and in time-may be one driving force that has fostered the diversification of bee foraging strategies. Summer and winter-spring wildflowers require different sets of bees working the same spot of ground. Furthermore, different years' weather produces entirely different mixes of bees in dry locales.

As noted in the Greek phrygana study mentioned earlier, only one-fifth of the entire insect fauna of this semi-arid site appeared, or was active, during each year of the study. Local bee diversity has also been influenced by the competition between bees and other flower-visiting creatures. When migrating hummingbirds miss the flowering of ocotillos, long-tongued or "robber bees" harvest a bumper crop of nectar.

As best we can tell, bee abundance depends on the availability of suitable materials-substrates-in which they can nest. Most bees are ground-nesters, so perhaps it is not too surprising that habitats having abundant bare ground-such as rocky deserts-have the greatest species diversity. Trampling by livestock can reduce the abundance of nest sites in semi-arid savannas and grasslands, but cattle are so sparsely distributed in true deserts that the rocky soils there still host a profusion of bees. Furthermore, since flooding on rocky desert slopes is a rare occurrence, underground bee cells are seldom inundated and ruined. Nor do soil-borne bacteria and fungi spoil their food stores as frequently as in the lowland rainforests. In sum, then, there are fewer constraints to bee diversification in the patchwork quilt of arid and semi-arid lands than in wetter habitats.

In a paper still widely discussed even though it was written a third of a century ago, the late, great ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson wondered out loud why so many kinds of animals could be alive in one place.

Hutchinson intuitively turned to Santa Rosalia for help in answering this question, while visiting her mineral-encrusted bones in a grotto near Palermo, Sicily. There, at the shrine dedicated to the twelfthcentury saint sheltered within Monte Pellegrino, he solved this old ecological riddle by reflecting upon a pool of water bugs. Hutchinson somehow recognized that the world's great zoological diversity was due to the interaction of certain forces. Wherever there was a mosaic of different physical and biotic microenvironments, diversity flourished.

This mosaic was especially favored by small animals; in fact, the number of species increases directly with a decrease in the average body

90

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

size of animals in a community. Deserts served as a mosaic of habitats, and clearly have triggered the adaptive radiation or species diversification of small pollinators such as bees. Each of these habitats had a different mix of floral attractants and rewards as well. As bees spread to different microenvironments to nest, they also developed ways to take better advantage of certain floral resources. Except for a few parasitic bees and a few "vulture bee" scavengers, all extant bees are true herbivores that eschew the taste of meat for vegetarian fare: they desire nectar and pollen. And as they began to specialize on a diet of liquid nectar and pollen grains, they developed new and often bizarre physiological and morphological adaptations.

Imagine floral nectars as their flight fuels and add to that a "bee bread" of protein- and lipid-rich pollen as brood food-this eccentric set of food preferences required the evolution of new toolkits by bees.

Their tongues have taken different shapes suited to the job of sucking nectar from variously formed floral cups, bowls, and vases. As a result, bees sort out into two discrete groups: those with long tongues and those with short ones. The broad, often bilobed tongues of the shorttongued bees apparently came first. When deeply tubular corollas came on the scene, millions of years later, bees with longer tongues became more abundant. The bee's tongue is a marvelous organ, one that is not merely useful for the slurping of nectar. It is also a trowel for plastering saliva and other waxy or oily secretions to their burrow walls in order to keep their underground cell walls protected from moisture, fungi, and collapse. At the very tip of each bee tongue is a fringed spoonlike flap-the flabellum-that allows the tongue to rapidly lap up the nectar hidden in pools and crevices within nectaries of each flower.

Melittologists sometimes joke about bees as "flying Swiss Army knives," and for good reason. More than any other floral visitor-vertebrate or invertebrate-bees display bizarre structural adaptations on their legs for wildcrafting a living out of the floral world. Their front legs may hold crescent-shaped bottle openers. Their hind legs may have tibial spurs, pollen rakes, brushes, and baskets, as you can see on social bees like honeybees and bumblebees. Examine the hairs on the hind legs of different bees with a hand lens or dissecting microscope, and you will see strong differences in their arrangement, size, and texture. The bees that routinely buzz flowers to harvest pollen have very thin hairs that

BEES IN THE BESTIARY, BATS IN THE BELFRY

91

capture and hold the small dry grains. The squash and gourd bees of the American Southwest and Mexico, however, have coarser and widely spaced hairs that help them carry the massive oily pollen grains of cultivated squashes, gourds, and pumpkins.

Within the hundreds of orchid bee species, or euglossines, we see even more fanciful structural adaptations for handling floral offerings.

Most orchids pollinated by these male bees play a game of deceit, offering bees neither nectar nor pollen as nutritious enticements for pollen transfer. The male bees do, however, harvest a floral fragrance from special patches of orchid tissue. They can do so thanks to their curiously modified forelegs, which have specialized hairs used for mopping over the scent patches of orchids. Thus the volatiles are wicked up by capillary action and later transferred from forelegs, to mid-legs, and finally to peculiarly swollen hind legs that hold reservoirs filled with spongy hairs. Here the males store up the orchid perfumes until they are needed as aphrodisiacs to attract female bees. The toolkits on their legs not only allow them to harvest sex scents from flowers, but also help the males work the perfumes into their own macho brew, an irresistible bee cologne.

Some of the most remarkable floral handling devices of all are found in bees of tropical climes. High in the rainforest canopies of Costa Rica and Panama, we have seen colorful, fast-flying anthophorid bees.

Known as Centris and Epicharis bees, these beauties are in the oil business. On their forelegs are hairs that have been transformed during their evolutionary history into comblike squeegees. When these bees visit yellow flowers in the tropical family Malpighiaceae, they use the oil squeegees to rupture floral blisters containing novel and nutritious foodstuffs. The harvested oils are then transported back to the nest by holding them between the stout brown or black bristles on the bee's hind legs. These floral oils are then mixed with pollen collected from other kinds of plants to be offered as oily gruel to their developing young.

If that is not curious enough, try to imagine the "legs race" that has been occurring in the Cape region of South Africa for millennia. Here bees in the genus Rediviva have evolved very long front legs-in some cases, longer than their entire bodies. The legs may have increased in length over time in response to the floral evolution of their twin-spur

92

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

snapdragon hosts in the genus Diascia. These snapdragon relatives have, over time, lengthened their floral spurs that house the energy-rich and nutritious lipids desired by these specialist bees. At the tips of Diascia's ludicrously long front legs, are, once again, those oil-sopping hairs.

Such toolkits have served bees well in their not-always-equitable "dances" with flowers. Call it a dance, or call it exploitation by both sides, pure and simple. Perhaps the term floral reward is a misnomer from earlier times when biologists believed these coevolved relationships to be one-to-one mutualisms that invariably provided equal benefits to both partners. Of course, not all flowers must provide massive concentrations of high-energy oils to feed their pollinators or hungry brood.

sTEVE REMEMBERS:

Some bees are so tiny that it's a wonder I even get to see them in flight.

Fortunately, I have a few friends who are faster with a sweep net than I am. I was once in a field of low-growing matlike spurges, wondering what their minuscule flowers could ever muster to offer a pollinator. A moment later, I watched as one of my colleagues swept his net across the tops of the spurge mats, then thrust his head into the gossamer aerial net bag. Strange behavior? Yes, unless you are Jerome Rozen of the American Museum of Natural History, and you are seeking a rather diminutive bee. I walked up to Rozen, baffled, and peered at him through the fine-mesh weave of the net. "Looks like you didn't get anything much."

"You just can't see small bees," Rozen grumbled. He had, in fact, captured the tiniest of the tiny panurgine bees, known as Perdita minima. Its name alludes to the fact that the smallest of its kind stretch out to a mere 3/50 of an inch. It is the world's smallest bee, and it rivals a fig wasp and some thrips for being the world's smallest pollinator. And yet its pollination services are dependably provided to the matlike spurges which stuck that day to the soles of Rozen's feet. What the spurge provides in pollen and nectar to this bee would be starvation food for other kinds of pollinators. But for this lilliputian Perdita, it does the trick.

BEES IN THE BESTIARY, BATS IN THE BELFRY

93

At the opposite extreme from the Perdita minima is a black giant, an immense leafcutter bee from the Moluccas islands halfway around the world. Alfred Russell Wallace, the codiscoverer of evolution by natural selection, spent time in these islands in the nineteenth century and found remarkable bees about 2 inches long living within the outer ramifications of termite "carton" nests. Chalicodoma pluto is the world's largest bee.

This sexually dimorphic species has females with grotesquely enlarged mandibles and other mouthparts. They use custom tools to collect plant resins and transport them back to the nest. Until the late 1970s this amazing bee was known only from the type specimen in the British Museum ofNatural History collected by Wallace, when it was rediscovered

by Adam Messer, then a graduate student at the University of Georgia.

You could balance dozens of Perdita minima upon the antennae of Wallace's lost bee.

Of course, there are many pollinating insects smaller than the smallest bee. There are over 500 species of flower thrips active in pollination, but they are not typically oriented toward pollen transport from one flower to another of the same species. They are, however, effective pollinators of many flowers. In fact, the diminutive thrips have recently been demonstrated to be highly effective obligate pollinators of certain dipterocarp canopy trees in the rainforests of Indonesia. Thrips typically range in size between o.o4 and 0.12 inch in length.

In this chapter, we can only glimpse some of the bewildering and fascinating shapes, sizes, and behavior of the myriad insects that visit and pollinate flowers. To fully do justice to insect pollinators other than bees, we would need pages to explore each major group of pollinating insects (beetles, butterflies and moths, flies and wasps) merely to highlight their biodiversity, their relative importance to pollination, and their astonishing lifestyles. Nevertheless, we offer a few case histories here to place these organisms in a conceptual framework within the vast worldwide pollinator bestiary. Ever since their origins more than Ioo million years before the present, various families and genera of the largest and most successful insect orders (Coleoptera, Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Lepidoptera) have diversified to exploit a wide range of flowering plants utilizing varied strategies. Some specialize on a few related plants; others are generalists that draw on a wider dietary base.

94

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

If we were to kneel among the brilliantly colored and fragrant wildflowers of an alpine meadow, our attention would soon be diverted by the guests invited to feed at the banquet. The air is filled with thousands of flying insects of all possible sizes, colors, and forms. The combined noise of their beating wings is especially loud; the sound from a lowpitched passing bumblebee careens past our heads. Smaller insects are everywhere-from tiny straw-colored thrips invisibly feasting upon pollen inside flowers, to acrobatic flower flies, to bee flies, buprestid beetles, spider wasps, bees, and a winged gallery of gaudy butterflies.

All of these insects are floral visitors, but not all will acquire pollen that can be passed along to the next flower on their visits. Some have come to slit "floral throats," robbing them of sweet nectar or stealing away with pollen without fulfilling the implied pact with the flowers. A few of the insects-especially bees, flies, and butterflies-are excellent and faithful pollinators upon which the local flora "entrusts" its sameday pollen delivery service. Let's depart now from the flowers of the meadow and examine the diversity of these pollinators.

More than all the rest combined, the order Coleoptera (with over 35o,ooo named species worldwide and many yet to be discovered) is the largest extant insect order and probably always was so. From the sap beetle pollinators of western spicebush to the specialized scarab beetles that enter and pollinate the flowers of the giant Amazonian waterlilies, beetles are the customers and pollen vectors of choice for thousands of flowering plants on most continents.

Approximately 30 families of beetles are today engaged in the pollination trade, often acting as what has been termed "mess-and-soil pollinators." While the label is not terribly flattering to this ancient lineage of inordinately successful insects, it does indicate their mode of entry and gustatory pursuits. Thus, sap and rove beetles attracted to the fragrance of the western spicebush merrily chomp on special food tissues and on modified petals, in addition to the pollen grains. In so doingand amidst a good deal of copulating and defecating-they effectively move the spicebush's and their own gametes around.

Whenever a bloodthirsty female mosquito peskily buzzes around our heads in a darkened room, we aren't likely to thank the males of its species for the pollination of rare orchids in Wisconsin peat bogs. Yet male mosquitoes seek out nectar-producing orchids and other plants

BEES IN THE BESTIARY, BATS IN THE BELFRY

95

and are dependable pollinators in many parts of the world. In temperate alpine meadows, there are often dozens of species clambering over the open, broad clusters of blossoms on plants like the giant cow parsnip. Our attention is diverted by the high-pitched whine and darting motions of a fuzzy golden bee fly with a black beaklike set of mouthparts used for extracting nectar from nearby blossoms. Thus the flies are exceedingly diverse and important pollinators the worlds over.

The order to which they belong, the Diptera, contains over 15o,ooo described species. And of those species with a taste for food on the half petal, there are at least 45 families of flies that routinely visit flowers.

Tubular flowers that are often pink or yellow in color with a sweet scent and abundant nectar at their base attract those scaly winged beauties sought out by "butterfliers" (a new breed of butterfly hunter who do their hunting with binoculars, notebook, and pencil). Butterflies are active by day and are found in about 16 families that regularly visit flowers in search of nectar. The order to which moths and butterflies belong, the Lepidoptera, contains at least 1oo,ooo living species according to current estimates by modern taxonomists. It may surprise the nonentomologist to learn that moths, the butterfly's nocturnal cousins (actually butterflies are likely derived evolutionarily from distant moth ancestors), outnumber the butterflies by about ten to one.

And yet moths are extremely important pollinators of night bloomers including the sacred datura and many cacti.

Although not so numerous as bees, their "colleagues" in the order Hymenoptera, wasps, also pollinate certain flowers. In the American Southwest, many spider wasps (like the giant tarantula hawk) are important floral visitors and pollinators of native milkweed plants. Similarly, figwort blossoms are especially adapted for visitations by wasps.

Many wasps have bodies that are too smooth-especially when compared to their hairy cousins the bees-to pick up much pollen. Some wasps do, however, have legs with coarse hairs that are adequate for picking up and transferring pollen from flower to flower while they go about their business of searching for sweet nectar within blossoms.

There are about 10 to 15,000 species of wasps that do function to some degree as pollinators of flowering plants.

It's hard to decide who might be the largest of the world's vertebrate pollinators-not because we don't know which floral visitor is the

96

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

biggest of them all, but because we don't know which dependably moves pollen between different flowers. Our guess, however, is that this distinction belongs to a Malagasy lemur, now highly threatened. Compared to the tiniest bee (Perdita minima) or a thrip, the black and white ruffed lemur is a thousand times larger from its head to the tip of its tail-in all, some 4 feet in length. It is the largest of the quadrupedal lemurs still left on this planet. This lemur is also many times more endangered than the tiniest bee, not only because of continued destruction of Madagascar's lowland rainforests, but also because it is hunted and trapped as a human food delicacy throughout its restricted range. Between r,ooo and IO,ooo of these lemurs remain in the wild. Nearly soo are held captive in a hundred different zoos around the world. The subspecies Varecia variegata variegata is considered to be endangered according to World Conservation Union criteria. Conservation International has given its conservation and habitat protection a "high priority" ranking, since it remains a popular target for Malagasy hunters.

In a recently celebrated confirmation that large, nonflying mammals can be effective pollinators, Hilary Morland of the Wildlife Conservation Society spent several seasons watching ro-pound black and white ruffed lemurs. These lemurs lived in a forest of"traveler's trees," Ravena/a madagascarensis. The national tree of Madagascar, this extraordinary plant has a single palmlike trunk which may grow 100 feet tall before sprouting a single vertical fan of banana-like leaves. During 40 daylight hours of observation, the lemurs were seen ascending the trunk to make 57 visits to the pale yellow flowers of the traveler's tree.

Once the lemurs arrive at a flower stalk, they use their nimble hands to pull open the tough bracts protecting a dozen or so flowers, then stuff their muzzles inside each flower to drink its nectar. After fruit, the traveler's tree nectar is this lemur's most important food. No other vertebrate in Madagascar appears to have the combination of agility and strength required to open the bracts to obtain the floral nectar of the traveler's tree. Morland and colleagues confirmed beyond doubt that this ro-pound lemur carries pollen in its fur from one plant to the next, and that its association with traveler's trees is ancient.

Of course, length from head to tail is not the only way to determine maximum size of a pollinator. Wingspan is another, and some of the flying foxes open their forearms to let their wings cover a 5 r/2-foot

BEES IN THE BESTIARY, BATS IN THE BELFRY

97

breadth. The largest flying foxes, however, are fruit-eaters first and come in a poor second as flower visitors and nectar drinkers. Their incidental movement of pollen, moreover, is not always well targeted.

But certain smaller flying foxes in the genus Pteropus are not the wasters of flowers that their overgrown kin may be. Pteropus includes 56 to 59 species occurring east from the islands in the Indian Ocean, well into the islands of the South Pacific. In fact, some have been found 200 miles out at sea, away from any landmass, so it is conceivable that flying foxes may actually be able to move pollen some distance between islands.

On the islands and peninsulas that flying foxes frequent, there is often a paucity of other vertebrate pollinators. Indeed, many plants rely solely on flying foxes for transporting pollen from plant to plant. Paul Cox and colleagues report that more than 92 genera of plants in 50 different families have been visited by flying foxes. Unfortunately for the plants that rely on this keystone species, many populations of flying foxes have suffered declines nearly as dramatic as those of lemurs. In the Philippines, where rso,ooo flying foxes would congregate in the 1920s, the largest gatherings today are seldom more than a couple hundred individuals. Three Pacific Island flying foxes have already gone extinct. Twelve other species are of concern to IUCN, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists three species as endangered on Pacific Islands claimed by the U.S. government.

In many ways, the North American equivalents of flying foxes are the nectar-feeders among the American leaf-nosed bat family, the Phyllostomidae. Thirteen genera in the subfamily Glossophaginae have been confirmed as pollinators for a variety of plants, ranging from bananas and tree morning glories to towering century plants and columnar cacti. Mexico alone has r 1 species of nectar-feeders in seven different genera, and 6 of those species are found nowhere else except Mexico. Two of them are locally rare, and there are unconfirmed reports that several others are in decline.

Aside from flying foxes and nectar-feeding leaf-nosed bats, 15 other genera of bats pollinate plants on various continents. Collectively they include at least 75 additional species that feed on nectar or pollen of vascular plants, including some plants known to be rare. It appears that a disproportionately large percentage of the s6 endangered species in the Chiropteran (bat) order are nectar-feeders and pollinators-also true of the ten bats that have already gone extinct. Nectar-feeding bats are a 98

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

large component of the 533 mammal species considered threatened with extinction by the Global Biodiversity Assessment.

Other, nonflying mammals are reported to have pollinated certain plants, but most of these reports are anecdotal at best. Our colleagues Charlie Jansen and John Terborgh have done much to establish that nonflying mammals such as opossums, marmosets, and tamarins are legitimate pollinators in the neotropical forests, and their rigorous methodology will no doubt be used by others to add species to pollinator lists. But the accepted cases of nonflying mammals serving as pollinators come mostly from Australia, where honey possums, dibblers, dormouse possums, feather-tailed possums, pygmy gliders, brush-tailed possums, and spotted cuscuses are among the marsupials that regularly feed on flowers. There are also reports of pollination by tree squirrels, bush rats, galagos, tree shrews, raccoons, kinkajous, olingos, and longtailed weasels. Many of these mammalian visitors destroy flowers while obtaining nectar, however, and spend an inordinate amount of time in single trees, rather than transferring pollen from one plant to the next.

If raccoons are indeed found to be legitimate pollinators of flowering plants, they will become the Heavyweight Pollinator Champions of the World, for they may weigh more than two and a halftimes the weight of the fattest variegated lemur.

Mammals may be the biggest vertebrates that serve as effective pollinators of plants, but they are hardly as diverse as the avian pollinators worldwide. Over 1,500 bird species in at least 18 families have been confirmed as effective pollinators of plants. Common names such as honeyeaters, honeycreepers, flowerpeckers, and honeyguides hint at these species' reliance on nectar. They range in size from 2-inch hummingbirds to Hawaiian crows ten times their size.

Of all the continents, perhaps Australia has the most widespread occurrence of birds as pollinators. More than 110 species of birds have been seen visiting some 250 plant species in Australia alone. Some 70 species ofhoneyeaters may be effective pollinators of Australian plants.

Lorikeets, parrots, silver-eyes, woodswallows, chats, sunbirds, orioles, trillers, thornbills, shrike-thrushes, treecreepers, bowerbirds, and butcherbirds have also been seen taking pollen or nectar from Australian flowers.

It is not surprising that honeyeaters and certain other nectar-feeding birds have brush-tongues that mirror the morphological adaptations to BEES IN THE BESTIARY, BATS IN THE BELFRY

99

nectar sucking found in certain bees. Theirs too presumably evolved for licking up sticky nectar. Asian flowerpeckers and honeyguides, Hawaiian honeycreepers, African sugarbirds, Australasian honeyeaters, paleotropical white-eyes-all show similar adaptations to particular floral traits such as long tubes and copious daytime nectar production. Neotropical hummingbirds clearly have no monopoly on avian adaptations to floral rewards.

At least 42 genera of nectar-feeding birds of the world, however, now include species threatened by the loss of floral resources and nesting habitat. Among these are no fewer than 26 hummingbirds considered globally threatened. Some, such as the hook-billed hermit and Chilean woodstar, are clearly endangered by the diminution of nectar resources resulting from massive tropical forest conversion to croplands. In addition, ornithologists remain concerned about 22 other hermits, coquettes, pufflegs, and metaltails in the hummingbird family, as well as 37 white-eyes, 7 flowerpeckers, I I honeyeaters, 4 honeyguides, and 7 orioles.

Although fish can walk and a few glide and fly, none have been reported as pollinators in the journals that we regularly read. The same can be said for frogs and salamanders. Thus the global decline in amphibians will not directly affect seed set among flowering plants. But a single reptile has made it onto our list of pollinators, as if to remind us that the Natural World seldom says "never." Geckos are the sole group of lizards that have been caught in the act of pollination-prying open the long flowers of New Zealand flax and inserting their tongues in the floral tubes to suck up nectar. These remarkable reptiles live on a few of New Zealand's offshore islands but are highly endangered due to introduced birds and mammals. While nectar-feeding, these geckos often brush up against flax anthers in a way that leaves plenty of golden pollen on their chins and throats. In fact, their throat scales are modified to hold onto flax pollen grains-much as the hairs of the lesser longnosed bat in Arizona are elaborated to increase their surface area for effective pollen pickup and delivery. The geckos then move on, carrying some of this pollen with them to another flower, sometimes on a plant located a considerable distance away from the first.

All told, we conservatively estimate there may be between I 3o,ooo and 2oo,ooo invertebrate and vertebrate species that regularly visit the

IOO

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

flowers of those higher plants which depend on animals to assure crosspollination. This number of animals is at least half the magnitude as the number of flowering plants (other than grasses) described in the floras of the continents of the world. How many are dependable, effective pollinators remains to be seen. And only our grandchildren will be able to grasp how many of these animals and plants survive the next 50 years, for the biological diversity of the entire planet is facing unprecedented threats.

BEES IN THE BESTIARY, BATS IN THE BELFRY

101

At dusk, a giant sphinx moth (Manduca quinquemac-

ulata) hovers just above the trumpetlike and sweetly scented blossoms ofjimsonweed (Datura discolor).

Note the long proboscis-the tongue-slightly bent and inserted deep within the flora tube to sip nectar.

THE FORGOTTEN POLLINATORS

By Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan Illustrations by Paul Mirocha

Available from Island Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble Your Local Independent Bookstore What readers are saying: “Their style is approachable and hopeful, even as they discuss the dire situations facing some pollinators and ecosystems worldwide. I wish I had discovered this gem sooner!”

—Amazon reader “I was absolutely amazed and highly impressed by how important pollination was to world food supply and health and how little care we have shown for the pollinators.”

—Goodreads reader

Paperback 9781559633536 $33.00

“The Forgotten Pollinators is solid science but it’s also a chatty book, full of personal anecdotes and asides, written in easy-going non-technical prose. It’s a book you might read in your study, in a lawn chair on your patio after planting your dahlia tubers, or even at the beach, as I did.”

—Amazon reader “Each page presented fascinating, sometimes alarming information, about our natural world that I had never seen, though it is always right in front of me. The most enlightening book I have read in years!”

—Amazon reader Stephen L. Buchmann is research entomologist at the Carl Hayden Bee Research Center and adjunct professor at the University of Arizona. Gary Paul Nabhan is director of science at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and author of eight books, including The Geography of Childhood and The Desert Smells Like Rain. The Forgotten Pollinators is the centerpiece of a nationwide campaign sponsored by the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum designed to raise awareness of pollinators and threatened plants dependent on them.